When it comes to remix culture, copyfight and crowd-sourcing, Brett
Gaylor walks the walk. The director of “open source documentary” RiP: A Remix Manifesto
released his feature-length film under a Creative Commons license and
even adopted Radiohead’s name-your-own-price business model when he
made the movie available online.

“We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible
as possible,” Gaylor explained in an e-mail interview conducted after
announcing the download Monday. “It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and
that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there
ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s
fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe,
that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to
people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in
fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”

Featuring mashup artist Girl Talk and luminaries like Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil and Cory Doctorow, RiP: A Remix Manifesto debuted in Amsterdam and Canada last year and in North America last month. It opens theatrically Friday in New York.

The movie’s compelling analysis of sampling, sharing and
copyfighting was pieced together over six years, during which Gaylor
shared his raw footage with other filmmakers, some of whose remixes he
spliced into the film. Given the realities of remix culture, where
there is no such thing as a final cut, Gaylor subsequently offered the
movie online as a remix experiment at Open Source Cinema, which he founded and beta-launched in 2004.

Since then, the little doc that could has nabbed awards, screened at
panels and walked the tightrope between theatrical and internet
distribution, original art and open-sourced amalgam, without falling
off.

Gaylor talks about copyfight crusaders, the trials and tribulations
of the distribution war, and the joys of messing with the media.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto director Brett Gaylor asks fans to pay what they will for his downloadable doc. Photo: Mila Aung-Thwin

Wired.com: The pay-what-you-want initiative makes
perfect sense for this film, but I’m betting it wasn’t easy to pull off
from a business perspective.

Brett Gaylor: It’s been a peculiar road to get to
the point where we could release the film as a download, because
obviously this is something we wanted to do right from the get go. But
since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including
theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act
to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be
rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup
on the film by giving it away. So we waited a while before launching
the various online permutations. The National Film Board [of Canada]
put up a chaptered version during our U.S. premiere at South by
Southwest in March, and we embedded calls to action into each chapter.

Around SXSW, we partnered with two American partners —
Disinformation for our DVD release, and BSide for the theatrical side
of things. And at the first meeting I had with them, it became clear
that we needed to go down this road. We knew the film would appear on
file-sharing networks immediately and we knew the audience for the film
wanted and expected it to be online. So knowing that, we wanted there
to be a method for those who wanted to pay to do so.

Wired.com: Are you satisfied with the arrangement so far?

Gaylor: It’s still not moving as fast as I’d
ultimately like. The pay-what-you-can is at the moment just available
for those in the U.S., while some of the other world territories do
their thing theatrically or on DVD. And we, being the National Film
Board of Canada, and our production company EyeSteelFilm, want those
territories to be able to have a chance to define their own business
model, so it’s fair. Its been a lot of tricky e-mails.

Wired.com: How has the theatrical run gone, and how are you feeling about the New York City opening?

Gaylor: The theatrical run so far has been amazing.
In Canada, it played literally coast to coast, and there is something
immensely satisfying as a filmmaker to see your film’s title on a
marquee and have people watch it together on a big screen. We went to a
lot of lengths for it to work well in that format; it’s got big sound,
beautiful graphics and animation, and the cinematographer Mark Ellam did an amazing job.

It’s also really challenging to engage the public in theaters,
because you’re playing your film to this broad demographic. We had
people in the lineups at the AMC trying to decide if they’d go see Benjamin Button
or this crazy copyright remix movie, so that was a surreal pleasure. It
also generated a ton of press for the film, mostly great, but the film
enraged the right-wing papers in the country who took a lot of umbrage
with its central themes.

Wired.com: Tell us about the New York screening, which coincides with a panel from the Open Video Alliance about standards and practices.

Gaylor: We’re doing a sneak preview on Friday and
then following up with the launch at the Open Video Conference, which
I’m extremely excited to participate in. I was part of the initial
planning sessions for this group back in the fall, and it really feels
like a culmination of all this disparate work that has been going on in
the free culture world for years. Filmmakers, free software geeks,
remixers, lawyers, academics — all these different people who have been
working on these parallel tracks are starting to feed their work into
one another, and I find it incredibly inspiring. So it will be an honor
to show the film there. It’s a tough crowd, too!

Wired.com: What are your thoughts on the future of open video?

Gaylor: I’m generally optimistic about it. There
are a lot of challenges, for sure: Lack of universal standards,
third-party rights, bandwidth, access for the developing world, and a
lack of basic media literacy among users. On the flip side, I think the
internet will very quickly overtake TV as the content-delivery medium
of choice, and with that comes the opportunity for a genuine
participatory experience. I think the time is now for developing the
tools, standards and practices to make sure we don’t just see TV 2.0.

Wired.com: Talk about working with Girl Talk’s
Gregg Gillis and Negativland’s Mark Hosler on this film and its various
openings. What role have both played in the evolution of remix culture?

Gaylor: Working with Gregg was a lot of fun. One of
the reasons I wanted to include him in the film is because he doesn’t
see himself as a copyright crusader. He’s a serious musician whose work
points out a lot of flaws, contradictions and challenges in current
copyright law. The fact that he’s been able to reach such a level of
success without a lawsuit has created a lot of elbow room for musicians.

When you think about Negativland,
which had a fairly major lawsuit filed against them over a decade ago,
it’s obvious that things are changing. Negativland had a huge influence
on my life. Watching it take such an intelligent, activist stance was
very inspiring, and you could tell they were taking such joy in fucking
with the media. It was something I looked at and said, “Yeah, I could
do that! I want to do that!”

Wired.com: How about Lessig and Doctorow?

Gaylor: Their writing put some meat on the bones,
and framed the debate for a whole generation of copyright activists.
For a lot of people, it was like suddenly realizing: “That’s what kind
of activist I am.”

Wired.com: You’ve said in your blog that
“theatrical distribution is a war.” Can you elaborate? And what does
internet distribution, legal and otherwise, offer in terms of an olive
branch?

Gaylor: It’s a war in that you have to do so much
to get the proverbial butts in the seats. It’s extremely costly and the
stakes are high, whereas I think the internet gives some opportunities
to speak directly to an audience. With RiP, we tried to have
the best of both worlds. It was important that folks who weren’t
exposed to these issues were able to see it, but we also wanted to try
and lower the friction as much as possible to those who were active
online and who would really see themselves in the film.

Wired.com: Now that you’ve made a film on these
issues, has your mind changed about intellectual property or ownership?
What’s the tightrope there?

Gaylor: The classic copyright ones: Providing an
incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the
work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are
pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in
speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me
that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And
eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will
fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.

Wired.com: Do you envision a day when theatrical distribution is a dinosaur, and we’re all paying to stream films online?

Gaylor: We’ll see how I feel about that in a year.
The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when
these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a
theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to
musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular
screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience
member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you
can get on a DVD or online.

NO DANCING WITH THE FLAVIN
A year ago, Artnet News published a light-hearted piece on a music video by former Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland, which set the pop star’s gyrations amid florescent light environments, and clearly owed a debt to the work of the late minimalist Dan Flavin [see Artnet News, July 29, 2008]. Well, not everyone thought the reference was so amusing. John Silberman,
of the law firm that represents the Flavin estate, writes to say that
the similarities actually led to legal action -- and that as a
consequence Sony BMG and the production company Partizan Entertainment "have agreed not to make any further use of the video."

And, indeed, it appears that the offending Philip Andelman-directed clip for Rowland’s single Work has been yanked from YouTube and MTV.com (as of this posting, the full video still appears on something called wat.tv,
for those who are interested). According to Silberman, the settlement
also involves monetary damages for the Flavin estate, though of an
undisclosed amount.

“But, I mean, in order to, to actually do human trials you have to
go through all this rigmarole, and rent is due, we don’t have time…”

Happiness is the Problem is a two-act opera buffa and comic
book about idealism and disillusionment. It stars three young women who
sell an elixir of happiness derived from the secretions of slugs that
they market as “Euphoressence.”

music by Jason Cady
comic book by Nadia Berenstein
libretto by Jason Cady and Nadia Berenstein
dialogue by Jason Cady, Nadia Berenstein and Amy Cimini

and:

BenNeill will present a concert of music for his self-designed mutantrumpet and interactive electronics. The program will include a new version of Neill’s earliest interactive computer piece, Dis-Solution 2 (1986), as well as new music with live digital video by Bill Jones. In these works the dynamics of Neill’s musical performance affect the video images in real time.

January 22, 2009

Techdirt is reporting that Against Monopoly
is reporting that HBO is sending take down notices to people who have
uploaded their own recordings of the Inaugural Concert: We Are One. I
haven’t been able to verify this, but if it is indeed the case, it
would seem that HBO is misunderstanding their rights under copyright
law. Note that I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice.

Since HBO merely owns the copyright to their recording of the
concert, they can’t control what other people were doing with their own
recordings from their own cameras. This is because a work is not
entitled to copyright protection unless it is fixed. The actual
performance that happened that evening wasn’t fixed or copyrighted
until it ended up on HBO’s tapes (or hard drives).

If the content of the concert was in the public domain or free (e.g., The Star-Spangled Banner is in the public domain since it was created prior to 1923),
then any audience member who recorded it had the right to make a
recording of it and distribute that recording since they owned the
copyright to the video. Putting aside questions of anti-bootlegging
laws (which are arguably unconstitutional
and not relevant to DMCA takedown notices), it is not clear that HBO
can prevent distributions of privately filmed performances of public
domain works that were performed in a public venue, which, if the
Against Monopoly report is correct, is what part of what they’re trying
to do.

Which means that by recording and distributing a live performance of
say, a Bruce Springsting song, an audience member might be infringing
on the boss’ copyright, but probably not HBO’s copyright. Does anyone
know more about bootlegging laws and how they might or might not apply
here?

So what right does HBO have to send takedown notices for other people’s works? Sending fraudelent DMCA takedown notices is itself a violation of the DMCA,
so if you’ve been threatened by HBO for posting videos you recorded at
the inaugural concert, you probably have the right to file a putback, and perhaps take action against HBO. [emphasis ng's]

There are bigger questions, however, about the inaugural committee’s
right to leverage tax payer money and support to sell off exclusive
rights of a public event to a private entity such as HBO. I’m not clear
on whether their status as a legal entity would entitle them to do this.

Anyway, while I would like to see HBO put the concert into the
public domain along with other works of the federal government, that is
probably impossible as the recording contains works that are in
copyright, such as Bruce Springsting songs.

There is the possibility that HBO could put the video but not the
audio into the public domain, but I do not think there is an easy work
around for including both the audio and video. This is not to say,
however, that HBO is justified in sending nasty letters to citizens
interested in helping celebrate an important event.

I sympathize with the inaugural committee’s desire to produce and
execute a fantastic recording of a historic moment in American history.
I know that this kind of production costs money and there must be
incentives for creating it. But I think the conflicts between HBO and
citizens indicate that copyright is not the proper incentive here. It
alienates too many citizens interested in documenting their own version
of history, and given the context and content of our current
president’s administration, sets the wrong precedent for sharing that
history. HBO should be ashamed of themselves.